So, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, and while you can say the world is vastly different than it was about 5 years ago when I slowly pulled away from blogging, there’s a lot that is still the same. My posts will be a mix of thoughts about comic books, politics and other things that interest me, but the one I am going to start with is comics:
Marvel has laid off staff in order to cut costs, and reports are that people there were already stretched thin. Editors have HUGE workloads and a lot of books that flow through their offices, as Marvel is publishing about as many books as they did in the period leading up to the 90′s boom, but there are a lot fewer office folks to do it. With sales not doing all that well, something had to give, and for the most part, it’s looking like they are going to go the route of most Poorly Run American Businesses, which is to lay people off, work the people who are still there harder and tell them they are luck y to have jobs.
One result of the downsizing that may be a good thing is that some mini-series that have been announced just aren’t going to come out.
Wait, you might say, what a horrid thing to say! I wanted to read another Victor Von Doom mini-series, or another mini-series about the Golden Age Timely heroes, and so on… Here’s the thing:
They don’t sell.
The All Winner’s Squad mini-series (ended with issue #5), sold about 7000 copies of the 4th issue and was down almost 50% for the sales of the first issue. Vengeance sold a little above that, and if you haven’t heard of that mini-series, who would blame you? Marvel has been tossing mini-series out into the market with very little marketing, even less demand, and then when they get collected into trades, who knows what they are about? Obviously not enough people, because they sell fewer than 1000 copies when they come out, and I can easily find them in half price bins a couple of months later at conventions. Usually that means, they were bought from liquidation lists as remainder prices.
I’m not saying these books are BAD. In fact, many of them have been great cheap reads, well wroth a couple of hours on a lazy afternoon.
What I’m saying is that there’s no reason for a comic fan to buy them. It’s not that someone in editorial said “This is a great pitch and we NEED to do this!”, it’s that someone in marketing or accounting said “We need five more hardcovers for September, can you get some mini-series for that?” And it seem that because no one in the office is in love with the books, they are shoved into the marketplace to wither.
Let’s face it, I’m not as plugged into what’s coming out as a shop owner, but I read Previews, I listen to podcasts, I take part in on line discussions and go to conventions. If I haven’t heard of a book, NO ONE is going to have heard of it.
The market has been down for a couple of years now, and even with DC’s big stunt, I’m not seeing it coming back as of yet.
However, laying off production and editorial staff is not how to fix the problem. It’s looking at the number of books being published, what the market will bear, what the demand for a book is and then adjusting editorial accordingly. Maybe they didn’t need as many editors as they had, but when editors are talking openly about how little time they have to go over books and how many books they have to run through their offices, you would think that lightening the work load a bit so that the product is better MIGHT be part of the equation.
But then, what do I know. I’m just part of the 99%, and obviously don’t understand business.